Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x review: a super-slim Copilot+ PC

The Yoga Slim 7x has fewer configuration options than many Lenovo laptops, and they’re simpler to understand and select. The only chipset option is the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, and with 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 14.5-inch 3K OLED display (the only option), it’s $1,199. Upgrading to 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD boosts the price to $1,313.

Those are attractive prices for a premium laptop, and more attractive than the OmniBook X that’s just $60 less expensive but with a lower-res IPS display.

The keyboard seems like a bit of a departure from other Lenovo designs. Its keycaps are less sculpted than I remember, and they’re smaller. That makes the spacing seem more generous. The switches are very good, with a snappiness, a comfortable bottoming action, and just enough pressure to create a precise feel. I like it a lot — not quite as much as the Magic Keyboard on recent MacBooks, but it’s very close.

The touchpad is mechanical, which is OK at its price. It’s very large and precise, but the button clicks are a bit loud. More premium laptops are including haptic touchpads, including all MacBooks and some other machines like the XPS 13. I miss it here.

The Yoga Slim 7x’s display is touch-enabled, which I like. That’s something the MacBook Air M3 doesn’t offer but some other competitors do, including the OmniBook X and the XPS 13.

The Yoga Slim 7x uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 chipset, the slowest version available. Each chipset has the same 12 cores (eight performance and four efficient), but the X1E-78-100 is the slowest at 3.4GHz and without a dual-core boost. The X1E-00-1DE is the fastest, running at up to 3.8GHz with a dual-core boost to 4.3GHz, while the X1E-84-100 in the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 runs just a little slower at 4.2GHz.

Our ability to test Windows on Arm laptops is a bit limited today, with only a subset of our usual benchmarks running natively. In two such benchmarks — Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 — we see that the Qualcomm chipset is significantly faster than Intel’s Meteor Lake and Apple’s M3 — in the latter case, in multi-core applications. In single-core applications, the M3 retains its speed advantages. Naturally, the Apple M3 Max chipset, which has significantly more cores, is much faster. That demonstrates how Apple Silicon can scale to much faster performance. And the M3 is faster in single-core, meaning that for lighter day-to-day workloads, the MacBook Air might feel more responsive.

In my testing, I didn’t run into any applications that simply wouldn’t run on the Yoga Slim 7x. Outside of benchmarks, apps running in emulation mode were plenty fast enough. And each of these laptops was fast enough to handle demanding productivity tasks. What’s most important is that Windows on Arm no longer has a performance penalty that should give the typical user pause. The Yoga Slim 7x has a fan, and it did spin up during testing. It’s not loud, but notably the MacBook Air M3 is fanless and therefore completely silent. That also affects the MacBook Air’s sustained performance.

The Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100’s Adreno GPU runs at 3.8 TFLOPS, while the faster chipsets run at 4.6 TFLOPS. And once again, we’re limited in how we can test Windows on Arm performance.

We have one benchmark that’s designed as a cross-platform benchmark to test a wide range of GPUs. That’s 3DMark Wild Life Extreme, and it’s aimed at lower-end graphics like Intel Arc. As such, it doesn’t show the same extremes in performance when compared to faster discrete graphics. In this test, the Yoga Slim 7x performed as expected. It’s roughly equivalent to Intel Arc but slower than the MacBook Air and Pro. That means it’s not more than an entry-level gaming laptop, like its competition, and it also means that it won’t perform better than Windows laptops with discrete graphics in apps like Adobe Premiere Pro that can use the GPU to speed up various processes.

The Pugetbench Premiere Pro benchmark tests that performance, but it doesn’t run yet on Windows on Arm. But by comparison, the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 9 scored 2,329 in the benchmark, while the MacBook Air M3 scored 3,633. Apple silicon is faster in this benchmark because of various CPU optimizations and not specifically because of its GPU performance. But it implies that the Yoga Slim 7x won’t be nearly as fast.

Ultimately, the Yoga Slim 7x is like its Windows x86 competition. It’s going to be fine for lightweight gaming and creativity, but you’ll want to wait for Windows on Arm machines with discrete graphics if you’re a creator or heavier gamer.

The Snapdragon X Elite has a neural processing unit (NPU) that’s rated at 40 tera operations per second (TOPS). That’s faster than the NPU in Intel’s Meteor Lake chipset that’s 10 TOPS, and also faster than the Neural Engine (NE) in Apple’s M3 chipset that’s at 18 TOPS.

Right now, we don’t have any way to benchmark the relative performance of these machines — at least, not that have been fully fleshed out and accurately assess AI performance.

More than anything, the Snapdragon X Elite and Windows on Arm promise better efficiency as a selling point. They’re somewhat faster than Intel Meteor Lake and the MacBook Air M3, but not enough that you would choose them based on performance along. But better battery life would be significant.

So far, I’ve found battery life to be a hard thing to evaluate. On the one hand, the Yoga Slim 7x has the same efficient Snapdragon chipset as the OmniBook X. But it has a larger battery at 70 watt-hours versus 54 watt-hours and a larger and more power-hungry 14.5-inch 3K OLED display versus a 14.0-inch 2.2K IPS panel that’s theoretically less power-hungry.

The Yoga Slim 7x costs at most around $60 more than the OmniBook X, but for that you get a spectacular OLED display. Just turning them on is a different experience entirely. OLED colors are so much brighter and more dynamic, and when combined with the inky blacks, they make for a much better first impression. And, that first impression lasts as you use the laptops.

According to my colorimeter, this is a quality OLED display. Its colors are incredibly wide at 100% of sRGB, 96% of AdobeRGB, and 100% of DCI-P3. That compares to the HP at 100%, 78%, and 100%, respectively. Both laptops have excellent color accuracy, at DeltaEs of 0.67 and 0.98 (less than 1.0 is indistinguishable to the human eye). The OLED display has nearly infinite contrast, which measures at 16,980:1 compared to the IPS panel at 1,400:1. And the Lenovo display is also much brighter at 489 nits versus 325 nits.

Given the similarities between the two laptops, it’s hard to justify the OmniBook X over the Yoga Slim 7x by display quality alone. That goes for many other laptops as well, including the MacBook Air M3.

And the Yoga has a four-speaker setup with two upward-firing tweeters and two downward-firing woofers, which provide for louder and clearer audio over the HP’s dual-speaker setup. It’s a great multimedia experience.

The Yoga Slim 7x doesn’t live up to the promise of MacBook-like battery life, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a new kind of Windows laptop. It’s still longer-lasting than most, and it’s faster than its immediate competition. Once AI becomes more important, it’s well-positioned there as well.

And compared to the first such laptop, the OmniBook X, the Yoga Slim 7x has an OLED display that’s so much better. For less than $100 more, that makes the Yoga a much more attractive laptop and much easier to recommend.